Eric Bana

Eric Bana: The Comedian Who Became Dangerous

To play Mark "Chopper" Read, Australia's most notorious criminal celebrity, Eric Bana shaved his head, put on thirty pounds and spent time in the company of the man himself. Until then his national reputation rested on doing impressions on a sketch show. Roger Ebert watched the result and wrote that "in a comedian named Eric Bana the filmmakers have found, I think, a future star." It is one of the more literal predictions in film criticism.

Broadmeadows and Tullamarine

Eric Banadinovich was born on August 9, 1968, in Melbourne. His father, Ivan, was a Croatian from Zagreb who worked as a logistics manager for Caterpillar; his mother, Eleanor, was German, from near Mannheim, and worked as a hairdresser. He has an older brother, Anthony, and was raised Catholic in Melbourne's Broadmeadows and Tullamarine, working-class outer suburbs near the airport. He attended Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School.

He was doing impressions by the age of six or seven, which in a migrant household in the northern suburbs was a survival skill as much as a party trick. As a teenager he watched Mel Gibson in Mad Max and decided he wanted to act, which is a very Melbourne origin story.

The Barman

In 1991, working behind the bar at Melbourne's Castle Hotel, he was talked into trying stand-up. His television debut came in 1993 on Tonight Live, and led straight to the sketch series Full Frontal, where he stayed from 1993 to 1996 writing his own material and impersonating the famous. He recorded a comedy album, Out of Bounds, in 1994 and hosted Eric in 1996. His own vehicle, The Eric Bana Show, was cancelled after eight episodes for poor ratings, and he won a Logie in 1997 for Most Popular Comedy Personality, an award and a cancellation arriving in roughly the same breath.

Chopper

His film debut came in 1997 in The Castle, but the pivot was Andrew Dominik's Chopper in 2000. The role required him to abandon everything that had made him employable: the likeability, the mimicry, the timing tuned for laughs. What he produced instead was a portrait of a man whose charm is indistinguishable from his violence. He won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actor and, seven years later, a second for Romulus, My Father in 2007.

The Hollywood Decade

Ridley Scott cast him in Black Hawk Down in 2001 without an audition, on Russell Crowe's recommendation. In 2003 he played Bruce Banner in Hulk; the film drew mixed reviews and his performance was praised for its conviction, a distinction that would recur. In 2004 he was Prince Hector in Troy opposite Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom, training in swordplay and horsemanship and drawing notices for a performance called magnetic and touching. Hector is the picture's moral centre, and Bana played him as a man who knows he is going to lose.

The peak was Steven Spielberg's Munich in 2005, where he played Avner, the Mossad agent leading the reprisal squad after the 1972 Olympics. The Los Angeles Times wrote that he "projects a combination of sensitivity and ruthlessness." The film received five Academy Award nominations. In 2009 he shaved his head again, this time for facial tattoos, as the villain Nero in J. J. Abrams's Star Trek, which took more than $380 million worldwide. "It was an unbelievable experience, and it's such a great group of actors," he said, and then declined to come back.

The rest of that stretch shows the same restlessness: the romance of The Time Traveler's Wife with Rachel McAdams and the comedy of Funny People, both in 2009; the war film Lone Survivor in 2013, which took $154.8 million; the horror procedural Deliver Us from Evil in 2014 as Sergeant Ralph Sarchie, which took $87.9 million.

The Beast

Also in 2009 he directed a documentary, Love the Beast, about a car. Specifically about the 1974 XB Ford Falcon coupe he bought at fifteen for A$1,100 and never sold, with contributions from Jay Leno, Jeremy Clarkson and Dr. Phil. This was not a vanity project so much as an admission: Bana is a serious amateur racer. He made his debut at Targa Tasmania in 1996, finished in the top ten of Australia's Porsche Challenge in 2004 with a fourth place at Sandown that November, and crashed the Falcon at Targa Tasmania in 2007, walking away unhurt. He is a lifelong St Kilda supporter and was made the club's Number One Ticket Holder in 2010.

He kept returning home. In 2018 he played the title role in Dirty John, whose creator Alexandra Cunningham said he had been her first choice; David Sexton of the Evening Standard wrote that "Bana is terrific as Dirty John, so sexy and appealing yet creepy too." In 2021 he led The Dry, an Australian outback thriller. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2019 for services to drama.

Why Eric Is Called a Genius

Nobody in the record calls Eric Bana a genius, and the claim, if it is to be made honestly, is a claim about craft with a specific mechanism behind it. The mechanism is mimicry. He spent his childhood and then his professional twenties reproducing other people's voices, postures and rhythms with enough accuracy to sell tickets, and impression work of that quality is a genuine cognitive skill: it requires hearing a person as a pattern rather than as a personality, then rebuilding the pattern from the inside. Almost every serious actor tries to reach that place through psychology. Bana arrived from the technical direction.

What makes his case unusual is that the transfer worked. Comedians who cross into drama normally bring the audience's affection with them and cannot shed it; Chopper required the opposite, and he did it by taking the same observational apparatus and pointing it at a violent man. That is why the descriptions of his best work keep landing on doubleness: sensitivity and ruthlessness in Munich, appealing yet creepy in Dirty John.

The counter-case is straightforward and should be stated. He is not an originator. Hulk was a mixed film with a well-played centre; several of the Hollywood roles asked for presence rather than invention; the one thing he has directed is a documentary about his own car. The word that fits the career better than genius is instrument, and the achievement is that he built his instrument out of a bar-room party trick.

Legacy

Bana married Rebecca Gleeson in 1997; their children, Klaus and Sophia, were born in 1999 and 2002. He never relocated permanently to Los Angeles and never stopped making Australian films, which is why a generation of Australian actors treats him as proof that the two things are compatible. Ebert's prediction was correct, but slightly wrong in emphasis: what the filmmakers found in 2000 was not a future star so much as a comedian willing to destroy his own likeability on camera.